Two days, one buildathon, and an idea that resonated later

Two days. October 11 and 12, 2025. My friend Sai Harish Puchala and I participated in the NxtWave × OpenAI Academy State-Level Buildathon at the Kapil Kavuri Hub, Hyderabad.

We built Orbius AI. It wasn't just another AI chat app. It was an AI development environment with multiple features built over a single weekend. One feature I was particularly excited about was Multi-Agent Mode, where GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other configured models could work together on the same problem instead of relying on a single model's response.

I led the development during the buildathon. In those two days alone, I made 17 commits and added more than 12,000 lines of code.

We presented it to the judges at the state-level event. Nothing really happened after that. The repository stayed public, but development eventually stopped as we moved on to other work.

Then, on November 23, 2025, Andrej Karpathy released llm-council. Today it has over 23.5K stars and 4.2K forks.

I'm not saying anyone copied anything. That's not the point. The point is that one of the ideas we had explored during our buildathon, having multiple LLMs collaborate on the same question, clearly resonated with the community.

The difference wasn't the existence of the idea. It was timing, reach, credibility, and distribution.

That buildathon taught me something I still think about today. Building something good is only half the job. Making sure the right people see it is the other half. Sometimes the difference between an abandoned side project and an open source success is not the code. It's who gets to see it.